the author re-reading one year+ out:

• My views on value of infographics that actually look nice have changed, perhaps I should have had nicer looking figures.
• "Unlike spreadsheets, users can describe in notebooks distributions, capturing uncertainty in their beliefs." seems overconfident. Monte carlo has been an excel feature for years. My dismissal of this (implicit) makes sense as a thing to say because "which usecases are easy?" is a more important question than "which usecases can you get away with if you squint?", but I could've done a way better job

(sorry for pontificating when you asked for an actual envelope or napkin) upside is an externality, Ziani incidentally benefits but the signal to other young grad students that maybe career suicide is a slightly more viable risk seems like the source of impact. Agree that this subfield isn't super important, but we should look for related opportunities in subfields we care more about.

I don't know if designing a whistleblower prize is a good nerdsnipe / econ puzzle, in that it may be a really bad goosechase (since generating false positives through incentives imposes name-clearing costs on innocent people, and either you can design your way out of this problem or you can't).

Is this a retroactive grant situation?

I think the lesswrong/forummagnum takes on recsys are carrying the torch of RSS "you own your information diet" and so on -- I'm wondering if we can have something like "use lightcone/CEA software to ingest substack comments, translates activity or likes into karma, and arranges/prioritizes them according to the user's moderation philosophy".

This does not cash out to more CCing/ingesting of substack RSS to lesswrong overall, the set of substack posts I would want to view in this way would be private from others, and I'm not necessarily interested in confabulating the cross-platform "karma" translations with more votes or trying to make it go both ways.

I've only been in IP / anticompetitive NDA situations at any point in my career. The idea that some NDAs want to oblige me to glomarize is rather horrifying. When you have IP reasons for NDA of course you say "I'm not getting in the weeds here for NDA reasons", it is a literal type error in my social compiler for me to even imagine being clever or savvy about this.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BGLu3iCGjjcSaeeBG/related-discussion-from-thomas-kwa-s-miri-research?commentId=fPz6jxjybp4Zmn2CK This brief subthread can be read as "giving nate points for trying" and is too credulous about if "introspection" actually works--- my wild background guess is that roughly 60% of the time "introspection" is more "elaborate self-delusion" than working as intended, and there are times when someone saying "no but I'm trying really hard to be good at it" drives that probability up instead of down. I didn't think this was one of thos... (read more)

Maybe he meant that at South by Southwest the chance is higher than 28%?

My _summary translation:

You have a classical string P. We like to cooperate across worldviews or whatever, so we provide sprinkleNegations to sprinkle double negations on classical strings and decorateWithBox to decorate provability on intuitionistic strings.

The definition of inverse would be cool, but you see that decorateWithBox(sprinkleNegations(P)) = P isn't really there, because now you have all these annoying symbols (which cancel out if we implemented translations correctly, but how would we know that?). Luckily, we know we can automate cancelation w... (read more)

i don't want to make claims about the particular case, but im worried if you infer a heuristic and apply it elsewhere it could fail

I think Nonlinear should be assigning enough credence to the possibility that they extremely harmed their employees with a degree of horror and remorse. Not laughter or dismissal.

Sometimes scrupulous/doormat people bend over backwards to twist the facts into some form to make an accuser reasonable or have a point. If you've done this, maybe eventually you talked to outside observers or noticed a set of three lies that you h... (read more)

This comment's updates for me personally:

• The overall "EA is scary / criticizing leaders is scary" meme is very frequently something I roll my eyes at, I find it alien and sometimes laughable when people say they're worried about being bold and brave cuz all I ever see are people being rewarded for constructive criticism. But man, I feel like if I didn't know about some of this stuff then I'm missing a huge piece of the puzzle. Unclear yet what I'll think about, say, the anon meta on forums after this comment sinks in / propagates, but my guess is it'll b

Ahhhhh kick ass! Stephen Mell is getting into LLMs lately https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.15784 you guys gotta talk I just sent him this post.

Ah yeah. I'm a bit of a believer in "introspection preys upon those smart enough to think they can do it well but not smart enough to know they'll be bad at it"^[1], at least to a partial degree. So it wouldn't shock me if a long document wouldn't capture what matters.

I second this--- I skimmed part of nate's comms doc, but it's unclear to me what turntrout is talking about unless he's talking about "being blunt"--- it sounds that overall there's something other than bluntness going on, cuz I feel like we already know about bluntness / we've thought a lot about upsides and downsides of bluntness people before.

Microsoft has no control, but gets OpenAI's IP until AGI

This could be cashed out a few ways--- does it mean "we can't make decisions about how to utilize core tech in downstream product offerings or verticals, but we take a hefty cut of any such things that openai then ships"? If so, there may be multiple ways of interpreting it (like microsoft could accuse openai of very costly negligence for neglecting a particular vertical or product idea or application, or they couldn't).

I heard a pretty haunting take about how long it took to discover steroids in bike races. Apparently, there was a while where a "few bad apples" narrative remained popular even when an ostensibly "one of the good ones" guy was outperforming guys discovered to be using steroids.

I'm not sure how dire or cynical we should be about academic knowledge or incentives. I think it's more or less defensible to assume that no one with a successful career is doing anything real until proven otherwise, but it's still a very extreme view that I'd personally bet against. Of course also things vary so much field by field.

Indeed - but maybe I was overly paranoid and I should've just clicked the buttons on the day.

This seems kinda fair, I'd like to clarify--- I largely trust the first few dozen people, I just expect depending on how growth/acquisition is done if there are more than a couple instances of protests to have to deal with all the values diversity underlying the different reasons for joining in. This subject seems unusually fraught in potential to generate conflationary alliance https://www.lesswrong.com/s/6YHHWqmQ7x6vf4s5C sorta things.

Overall I didn't mean to other you-- in fact, never said this publicly, but a couple months ago there was a related post ... (read more)

In my sordid past I did plenty of "finding the three people for nuanced logical mind-changing discussions amidst a dozens of 'hey hey ho ho outgroup has got to go'", so I'll do the same here (if I'm in town), but selection effects seem deeply worrying (for example, you could go down to the soup kitchen or punk music venue and recruit all the young volunteers who are constantly sneering about how gentrifying techbros are evil and can't coordinate on whether their "unabomber is actually based" argument is ironic or unironic, but you oughtn't. The fact that t... (read more)

Winning or losing a war kinda binary.

Will a pandemic get to my country is a matter of degree, since in principle you can have a pandemic that killed 90% of counterfactual economic activity in one country break containment but only destroy 10% in your country.

"Alignment" or "transition to TAI" of any kind is way further from "coinflip" than either of these, so if you think doomcoin is salvageable or want to defend its virtues you need way different reference classes.

Think about the ways in which winning or losing a war isn't binary-- lots of ways for implem... (read more)

height filter: I don't see anywhere about how many women use the height filter at all vs dont ^[1]. People being really into 6'5" seems alarming until you realize that if you're trait xyz enough to use height filters at all, you might as well go all in and use silly height filters.

I've certainly wondered this! In spite of the ACX commenter I mentioned suggesting that we ought to reward people for being transparent about learning epistemics the hard way, I find myself not 100% sure if it's wise or savvy to trust that people won't just mark me down as like "oh, so quinn is probably prone to being gullible or sloppy" if I talk openly about my what my life was like before math coursework and the sequences.

Yes. So much love for this post, you're a better writer than me and you're an actual public defender but otherwise I feel super connected with you haha.

It's incredibly bizarre being at least a little "early adopter" about massive 2020 memes -- '09 tumblr account activation and Brown/Garner/Grey -era BLM gave me a healthy dose of "before it was cool" hipster sneering at the people who only got into it once it was popular. This matters on lesswrong, because Musk's fox news interview referenced the "isn't it speciesist to a priori assume human's are better th... (read more)

I'm wondering if we want "private notes about users within the app", like discord.

Use case: I don't always remember the loose "weight assignments" over time, for different people. If someone seems like they're preferring to make mistake class A over B in one comment, then that'll be relevant a few months later if they're advocating a position on A vs B tradeoffs (I'll know they practice what they preach). Or maybe they repeated a sloppy or naive view about something that I think should be easy enough to dodge, so I want to just take them less seriously in ... (read more)

(I was the one who asked Charles to write up his inside view, as reading the article is the only serious information I've ever gathered about debate culture https://www.slowboring.com/p/how-critical-theory-is-radicalizing )

hm maybe you have a private note version of a post, but each inline comment can optionally be sent to a kind of granular permissions version of shortform, to gradually open it up to your inner circle before putting it on regular shortform.

I'm curious and I've been thinking about some opportunities for cryptanalysis to contribute to QA for ML products, particularly in the interp area. But I've never looked at spectral methods or thought about them at all before! At a glance it seems promising. I'd love to see more from you on this.

While I partially share your confusion about "implies an identification of agency with unprovoked assault", I thought Sinclair was talking mostly about "your risk of being seduced, being into it at the time, then regretting it later" and it would only relate to harassment or assault as a kind of tail case.

I think some high libido / high sexual agency people learn to consider seducing someone very effectively in ways that seem to go well but the person would not endorse at CEV a morally relevant failure mode, say 1% bad setting 100% at some rape outcome. Ot... (read more)

"some person in the rationalist community who you have seen at like 3 meetups."

I think what's being gestured at is that Sinclair may or may not have been referring to

1. the base rate of this being a bad idea
2. the base rate of this bad idea conditioning on genders xyz

An example of the variety of ways of thinking about this: Many women (often cis) I've talked to, among those who have standing distrust or bad priors on cis men, are very liberal about extending woman-level trust to trans women. That doesn't mean they're maximally trusting, just that they're... (read more)

There was a bunker workshop last year, an attendee told me that early on everyone reached a consensus that it wasn't going to be a super valuable or accurate strategy in the first few hours of the first day, then goofed off the rest of the weekend.

It'd be great if yall could add a regrantor from the Cooperative AI Foundation / FOCAL / CLR / Encultured region of the research/threatmodel space. (epistemic status: conflict of interest since if you do this I could make a more obvious argument for a project)

$i_X:X\to X\coprod Y$ is the inclusion map.

what makes a coproduct an "inclusion mapping"? I haven't seen this convention/synonym anywhere before. 

ok, great! I'm down.

Incidentally, you caused me to google for voting theory under trees of alternatives (rather than lists), and there are a few prior directions (none very old, at a glance).

Seems like a particularly bitterlessony take (in that it kicks a lot to the magical all-powerful black box), while also being over-reliant on the perceptions of viewpoint diversity that have already been induced from the common crawl. I'd much prefer asking more of the user, a more continuous input stream at each deliberative stage.

1. I've been very distressed thinking that instrumental and epistemic parts are not cleanly separable, and that entire is-ought gap or humean facts-values is a grade school story or pedagogically noble lie https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kq8CZzcPKQtCzbGxg/quinn-s-shortform?commentId=fdCTjtJgucYP9Xza4
2. I got severely burnt out from exhaustion not long after writing this, and one of the reasons was the open games literature lol. But good news! I was cleaning out old tabs on my browser and I landed on one of those papers, and it all made perfect sense instantly!